wiki-formats
wiki formats
Authors
- Tantek Çelik
Intro
Ian Hickson recently lamented to me that:
"I have yet to find a wiki that has both a nice syntax (i.e. one that looks like text/plain as opposed to one that looks like just another obscure markup language -- if you're going to use markup, why not just use HTML in the first place), and that produces semantic markup (as opposed to having tags for "bold" and "italics")."
And I have to kind of agree with him. My experience with current wiki formats is that they haven't done that good a job of "paving the cowpaths", that is, taking what people write in plain text documents, and interpreting them as structure, rather than inventing new text conventions (e.g. equal signs for headings?!?) and getting people to learn them.
This page is an attempt to catalog/document current wiki and wiki-like text formats to see if there is any chance of solving this problem.
Technically a wiki format would not be a microformat because it is not expressed in XHTML building blocks. However, many of the other principles of microformats can be applied to perhaps come up with a better solution that what wikis use today (since they all seem to use their own variant formats anyway).
wiki software
MediaWiki
What you're using now.
- paragraphs
- blank line creates a new paragraph
- lists
- start a line with "* " and it will put it into an unordered list.
- use multiple "*", e.g. "** " for 2nd level, for nested unordered lists.
- headings
- prefix (and suffix?) with "=" for level 1 heading, "==" for level 2 heading etc.
- literal
- use <pre> ... </pre> tags
MoinMoin
What the Technorati Developer's Wiki uses.